Molly Crabapple, The Guardian; Is AI the greatest art heist in history?
New technologies of reproduction are plundering the art world – and getting away with it
"In 2026, its easy to see why generative AI is bad. The internet has nicknamed its excretions “slop”. The CEOs of AI companies prance about on stage like supervillains, bragging that their products will eliminate vast swathes of work. Generative AI requires sacrificing the world’s water to feed its hideous data centres. Around the globe, chatbots induce schizophrenic delusions and urge teens to kill themselves – all while turning users brains to mush.
Who could have predicted this? Artists, that’s who...
When tech boosters want to demonise resistance, they invoke the luddites. By their telling, the luddites were primitive idiots, who smashed machines they were too stupid to understand. History though, tells a different story. As recounted by Brian Merchant’s sublime work Blood in the Machine, luddites were skilled artisans, fighting for their way of life against the “satanic mills” – textile sweatshops powered by child semi-slaves. Forbidden from unionising, luddites smashed machines as a protest tactic. And they did not lose to the inevitable march of progress. They lost to physical force. The government called in troops, and the luddites were either executed or shipped to penal colonies in Australia.
Artists too are fighting for a way of life. And if we are too disorganised to triumph, that will be everyone’s loss. AI companies’ inappropriate scraping may have started with the work of illustrators like me, but it has grown to encompass everything else. It extends to the billions of dollars that these companies squander each year, to the carbon they burn, to the rare minerals in their chips, to the land on which their data centres sit, to culture, education, sanity and our very imaginations. In return for the entirety of the human and non-human world, the tech lords can only offer us dystopia. Their fantasy future contains neither meaningful work nor real communities, just robots chattering to each other, leaving nothing for us."
